John W. James

Where were you when I needed you?

The saddest question we ever hear is, "Where were you when I needed you?"

That's what people ask when they find out what we do in helping grievers. We're presenting helpful and accurate information on this site, at the time you need it most, with the hope that you'll never need to ask that question.

It's an honor and a sad privilege to be addressing you, knowing that each of you has recently experienced the death of someone important to you. We also know some of you are reading this because of your care and concern for someone who is confronted by the death of someone important in their life.

We bring our personal experience in dealing with the deaths of people who were important to us, and our professional know-how in helping grievers for more than 30 years. We'll help you distinguish between the "raw grief" that is your normal and natural reaction to the death, and the equally normal "unresolved grief" that relates to the unfinished emotions that are part of the physical ending of all relationships.

A basic reality for most grieving people is difficulty concentrating or focusing. With that in mind, we asked Tributes.com to print our articles in a large type font to make them easier to read. Sharing our concern for grieving people, they agreed.

Ask The Grief Experts

How can I help my 13 year old daughter get her life back on track? My husband, her dad, died 11/09/09, his funeral was 11/19/09. My birthday is also in November, and then comes Thanksgiving and the Christmas season. She was a happy and adventurous girl, a straight A student in the gifted program. Now she gets F's, does not want to go to school, does not want friends, does not want to go or do anything.

A Grief Expert Replies:

Dear Pam,

Oh, Pam, there’s so much in your note.

As you probably know from painful experience, one of the hardest things to do is to help people who haven’t asked for help. We guess that to be true in relation to you and your daughter because if she was more eager to be helped, you would either not have written to us, or the content of your note and questions would be different. And even more painful, is when your own child obviously needs the help but won’t take it.

The single most universal reaction to loss is the inability to focus or concentrate—as witness your daughter’s descent from A student to F, along with the other issues you mentioned. So we are not surprised, even 2+ years after her dad’s death, that things are bad for her, and maybe even getting worse. Also, we are very aware of the impact of so many events tied around the holiday season which is a massively emotional time to begin with.

That said our guidance for you may surprise you. The key to your daughter getting help is you. We don’t know what exactly you have done—or not done—to help yourself deal with your emotional reaction to your husband’s death. Without knowing more about you on that issue, we can’t be definitive, but we can make some educated guesses.

As a generality, we know that many parents who find themselves in the situation you’ve been in since 11/09/09, tend to try to Be Strong for their children. And in Being Strong they often cover up or hide their own sad feelings. When that happens, the children will copy the parent and hide their feelings too, with the inevitable result of extending the initial reactions that included inability to concentrate and the isolation your daughter is exhibiting.

Even if the above is not true about you, there may have been an absence of actions on your part that helped you, and that your daughter might have been able to observe in you. If you did not know what to do with your emotions, then you wouldn’t have been able to model any actions of recovery for your daughter.

Again we don’t know much about you, so please excuse our generalized presumptions. But in any case, we’d strongly recommend you go to the library or bookstore and get copies of both our books, The Grief Recovery Handbook and When Children Grieve. You could start with either of them, but considering that you wrote to us with your concern about your daughter, you might read When Children Grieve first. The subtitle of the book is: For Adults To Help Children Deal With Death, Divorce, Pet Loss, Moving And Other Losses.

As you read the book, it will address the obvious fact that many, in not most, of the losses that affect your child, probably have affected you, and it will gently urge you to go to the other book, The Grief Recovery Handbook, to get helpful guidance for yourself.

From our hearts to yours,

Russell And John

PS - Addition from Tributes.com Team - we are a strong supporter of Comfort Zone Camp - a national camp for grieving children. Family and friends of grieving children can find out more information at: http://www.comfortzonecamp.org/.